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28 Jun 2011

More Bad News From Fukushima

On the 26th June, yet another incident happened at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power plant. It appears from the video below that Unit 3 and 4 released a large amount of smoke or steam into the atmosphere.

Unit 3 contains the highly dangerous plutonium MOX fuel that is far more radioactive than "normal" reactor fuel. Tepco and officials haven't made a media release in the two days following, leaving people to speculate about the danger the Fukushima Nuclear power plant posses.

This follows the 8th June revelations that theInternational Atomic Energy Agency doubled its estimate on the amount of radiation released from Fukushima to 770,000 terabecquerels.

We also learned recently that officials had doctored global fallout information, making claims by Governments that levels remain safe questionable. Slightly elevated levels have been detected recently in San Diego. The US continues to not have any proper public radiation monitoring system.

New readings taken in May showed levels of radioisotopes 30 kilometers
offshore from the on-going crisis at Fukushima are ten times higher than
those measured in the Baltic and Black Seas during Chernobyl.

After previously denying it, TEPCO confirmed and the IAEA reported that fuel at Unit 1 melted down before the arrival of the Tsunami on 11th March. This shows that many of the worlds nuclear reactors are unsafe because they are placed on or near known fault lines.

We already know that reactors one, two and three suffered at least partial fuel melts. In at
least one case, the fuel melted through part of the inner
containment system, with molten radioactive metal melting through to the
reactor floor. Unit 4 may have been entirely exposed to air and caught fire.
A wide range of sources confirm the likelihood that
fission may still be proceeding in at least one Fukushima core and the 26th June video certainly points to such a conclusion.

There's no question in my mind that Fukushima Dai-ichi is now the worst known nuclear accident in the world, far exceeding Chernobyl. Japan seems unable or unwilling to contain the Fukushima disaster and is instead expending it's energy on hiding the truth. Perhaps there's a case to be answered in the International Court of Justice.